2024 delivered an exceptional year for science fiction. We got sweeping space operas, intimate literary experiments, and everything in between. Whether you want to lose yourself in interstellar politics or contemplate what makes us human from 250 miles above Earth, this list has you covered.
Here are the ten sci-fi books that defined 2024.
1. The Mercy of Gods
By James S.A. Corey
The authors behind The Expanse return with the first book in The Captive's War trilogy. When the all-powerful Carryx empire arrives on the planet Anjiin, humanity goes from thriving civilization to conquered species overnight. Dafyd Alkhor and his research team are abducted to serve their new alien overlords—but survival might require becoming something they never imagined. This is Corey at their best: propulsive plotting, morally complex characters, and worldbuilding that rewards close attention.
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2. Orbital
By Samantha Harvey
This Booker Prize winner does something radical: it slows down. Six astronauts orbit Earth over 24 hours, watching 16 sunrises and sunsets while their minds drift through memory and reflection. At just 136 pages, it's a meditation on our planet's fragility and the strange beauty of seeing it from above. Literary fiction readers who've avoided sci-fi will find their entry point here.
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3. Alien Clay
By Adrian Tchaikovsky
Professor Arton Daghdev is a political dissident exiled to a penal colony on the alien planet Kiln. The assignment seems straightforward: study the ruins of a vanished civilization. But Kiln's ecosystem doesn't play by Earth rules, and Daghdev begins to suspect that the line between explorer and explored is blurrier than anyone admits. Tchaikovsky delivers body horror, political allegory, and genuine wonder in equal measure. A Hugo and Philip K. Dick Award finalist.
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4. The Ministry of Time
By Kaliane Bradley
A government ministry discovers time travel and uses it to rescue people from history moments before their deaths. One civil servant is assigned to be the "bridge" for Commander Graham Gore, an 1847 Arctic explorer—which means living with him, teaching him about the modern world, and absolutely not falling for him. Bradley's debut blends spy thriller, rom-com, and speculative fiction into something that shouldn't work but completely does. Winner of the Goodreads Choice Award.
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5. Service Model
By Adrian Tchaikovsky
Yes, Tchaikovsky makes the list twice—he's that prolific and that good. Charles is a robot valet programmed for household chores. Then a glitch causes him to murder his owner. Without a master, Charles is worthless in a society built on artificial labor, so he flees into a world he never knew existed. Part satire, part philosophical road trip, this is Douglas Adams meets Kazuo Ishiguro. A Hugo Award nominee.
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6. The Mars House
By Natasha Pulley
January Stirling, principal ballerina of the London Ballet, flees a flooded Earth to become a climate refugee on Mars. There, he must wear a weighted cage to compensate for Mars's lower gravity—and soon finds himself in an arranged marriage with Senator Gale, a Martian politician running on an anti-Earthling platform. Pulley examines colonialism, climate displacement, and how the persecuted can become persecutors. It's queer, it's political, and it's impossible to put down.
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7. Lake of Darkness
By Adam Roberts
Two starships orbit a black hole. By day's end, both crews are dead, and the sole survivor claims he acted under orders from a voice inside the singularity. Roberts, one of the UK's most underrated SF writers, delivers hard science and existential dread in equal doses. If you like your sci-fi with philosophical heft and genuine weirdness, this is your book.
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8. Some Desperate Glory
By Emily Tesh
Kyr has trained her whole life on Gaea Station, a human military outpost holding out against the alien majo who destroyed Earth. When she's assigned to the breeding program instead of combat, she goes AWOL to find her brother—and discovers that everything she believed about the war is wrong. This won the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Novel, and it earns that distinction. A coming-of-age story wrapped in a space opera wrapped in a deconstruction of military SF tropes.
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9. The Book of Elsewhere
By Keanu Reeves and China Mieville
An immortal warrior who has killed for 80,000 years wants nothing more than to die. This collaboration between action star Reeves and weird fiction master Mieville expands on Reeves's BRZRKR comic series, but you don't need to know the source material. The New York Times called it "a pulpy, adrenaline-fueled thriller" that's also "a moody, experimental novel about mortality." It's violent, strange, and surprisingly moving.
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10. Not Till We Are Lost
By Dennis E. Taylor
The fifth Bobiverse novel finds our sentient Von Neumann probes scattered across the cosmos and fractured among themselves. Icarus and Daedalus return from a 26,000-year mission to the galactic core with news that might explain the Fermi Paradox—but the answer raises more questions than it settles. If you've followed Bob from the beginning, this delivers. If you haven't, start with We Are Legion (We Are Bob) and thank me later.
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These ten books show sci-fi doing what it does best: asking "what if?" and following the answer wherever it leads. If you're looking for more personalized recommendations, add your favorites to ShelfHop and let us suggest what to read next. And if political intrigue and magic are more your speed, check out our best fantasy picks of 2024.